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Snow White: Ballet Preljocaj at the Brisbane Festival

Angelin Preljocaj’s Snow White oozes sex, glamour and fantasy in a visually ravishing production that juxtaposes a monumental, golden-hued court with the mysterious vibrations of the deep forest.

It’s an extravagant world of abseiling dwarfs, luscious nymphs, huntsmen who look like tough mercenary soldiers, a dead mother who flies – literally – to her stricken daughter’s side and an unearthly sacrificial stag.

The familiar narrative is essentially intact but given an erotic charge. It’s clearly a version for grown-ups when costuming duties are taken by Jean Paul Gaultier, whose designs are witty and revealing in more ways than one. The Queen, enraged by her stepdaughter’s maturation into a desirable woman, has the kinky attire of a classy dominatrix (although ends as a Bob Mackie-era Cher lookalike); Snow White is dressed in blinding, virginal white but her gown is exceptionally revealing of hip and thigh. She looks fetchingly juicy. Her Prince comes out of proceedings less well, being asked to sport tight matador-like trousers in an unbecoming shade of apricot, but otherwise everyone looks fabulous.

Emilie Lalande in Ballet Preljocaj’s Snow White

As an image-maker Preljocaj is a winner. The Queen’s cramming of the poisoned apple into Snow White’s mouth is vicious and horrifying – a violent counterpoint to the Prince’s earlier gift to Snow White of a feather-light red scarf that at one point gently covers her face. The deaths that open and close the piece are strikingly staged and it was an inspiration to recast the dwarfs as floating, tumbling miners.

Choreographically and structurally things are much more mixed. Certainly the passionate pas de deux for Snow White and the Prince hit the mark, although the awakening scene will rather remind balletomanes of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. But a long court dance early in the piece exhausts its charms far more quickly than it ends, a fate that affects almost every part of the piece. Each is simply too long for the material – ballet and folk-flavoured contemporary dance – Preljocaj has devised for it. As well as oozing sex Snow White oozes sluggishness.

The Grimm brothers’ story is short and sharp. Preljocaj should have heeded their gift for compression or, in a piece that lasts nearly two hours, taken the opportunity to colour in the relationship between the King and the Queen.

And disappointingly, Snow White hammers home the tired trope of female vanity in the face of ageing but doesn’t have anything to say about society’s brutal rules about how one should look.

On opening night Emilie Lalande was a gorgeous Snow White, fresh, sensuous and strong. Redi Shtylla had some remarkably ugly choreography as the Prince but partnered Lalande heroically. Cecilia Torres Morillo had little more to do than stalk about and posture as the Queen but did so ferociously.

The music – slabs of Mahler with added electronic atmospherics from 79 D – often didn’t suit the choreography but was satisfyingly played by Queensland Symphony Orchestra with Johannes Fritzsch conducting.

Snow White ends on September 11. The performance on Thursday September 8 will be live-streamed by Queensland Performing Arts Centre.